----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert J. Chassell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <brin-l@mccmedia.com> Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2007 8:11 AM Subject: Was the conversion of John C Wright numinous?
> A conversion by a highly educated and very decided athiest just > seems to be an unusual occurance to me. > > Not at all unusual ... if he has an experience that > > ... compounds the emotions of love, fear, dependence, > fascination, > unworthiness, majesty and connection. > > That is how the anthropologist, Roy Rappaport, described a numinous > experience. He also said that it is "utterly convincing." > > The latter is very important. People try not to be fooled. But if > they have had an utterly convincing experience, that means they > believe. > > A numinous experience is an internal experience. Unless you know > you > are crazy, what you feel internally you think is true. A numinous > experience is usually interpreted in terms of the person's culture, > what ever it may be. Thus a person brought up in a Hindu culture > tends to interpret his or her numinous experience as a Hindu, a > person > brought up in a Moslem culture tends to interpret such an experience > as a Moslem, and a person brought up in a Christian culture tends to > interpret a numinous experience as a Christian, even if overtly, > ahead > of time, he or she was not Hindu, Moslem, or Christian. > > The only other kinds of experience a person has that are internal > are > based on reasoning, observation, or experiment. (Experiment is a > variety of observation. These other kinds of internal experience > create beliefs that can cross cultures.) > > There is another way of gaining knowledge, of learning truths, that > has nothing to do with this. It is reasonable for children and > necessary for adults: hearing (or reading, copying ...). > > Children can expect that their genetic progenators, their parents, > want them to succeed. So children have good reason to accept the > information that parents provide. That information is hearsay -- it > is not what the children have reasoned, observed, or discovered by > experiment, but what they have heard. (They may well think of it as > knowledge they know culturally, rather than knowledge they heard, > since they learned so young. Book learning -- this message -- comes > under this rubric.) > > Also, in a paleolithic band -- in the environment humans evolved -- > children could also mostly depend on friends of their parents to > want > them to succeed. The parent's friends would nearly be as believable > as parents. They would not have quite the same interest in others' > children succeeding, except that those children would be important > to > the band some day. That meant that the children would become > important to the parent's friends. So children would most likely > believe them, especially if they were leading people in the band. > (But they would not believe them as strongly as they believe their > parents.) > > As a practical matter, adults lack the time to discover everything > by > reasoning, observation, or experiment. So grownups too must depend > on > what others say. This is a key notion. > > Knowledge either comes from internal experience -- numinous, reason, > observation, or experiment -- or comes from external experience, > what > others say, hearsay. > > As far as I know, fundamentally, those are the only sources. > > (I am not speaking here of con men and other crooks, but of people > who > sincerely believe in the knowledge they relate to others.) That is close enough to my understanding that I would not quibble. But again, in Wrights case, how does one explain a person who is not from a Marian tradition having a visitation from the "Mother Of God"? It is not something one would expect to hear from (frex) a Baptist, much less an athiest raised in a (according to Wright) non-Marian tradition. But allow me to attempt to answer my own question here, and everyone is free to correct me or expand as they see fit. Wright is an educated person: "A retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, he graduated from the Law School at the College of William and Mary in 1987, after having studied the Great Books at St. John's College of Maryland. He was admitted to the practice of law in three jurisdictions (New York, May 1989; Maryland, December 1990; Washington, DC, January 1994)." And from an interview: "I went to St. John's College in Annapolis, which is the home of the "Great Books" program. There are no tests and no grades at that school, and no lecture classes. There is never a time when the student is not allowed to speak. There are no secondary texts; we do not read some blowhard second-guessing what the geniuses of history thought; we read the geniuses in the original. We read the Great Books of Western Literature in chronological order, from Homer and Aristotle, through Hobbes and Shakespeare, Newton and Pascal, to Freud and the Federalist Papers. By graduation, the student knows Greek and Latin grammar, logic, and rhetoric, geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, and music. I can tell you what such an education does for you. You are like a man with a memory in a land of amnesiacs. All the sophomoric ideas presently being preached from the pulpits of the pundits, all the clever policies of clever politicians: it has all been done before. All their errors were refuted long, long ago. Aristotle debunked Marx two thousand years before Marx put pen to paper. The Twentieth Century A.D. might have been spared a great deal of grief and bloodshed, had she remembered the Fifth Century B.C. " So from the above information I might posit that Wright has a bias for original sources and feels he is competent to interpret such on his own. The Catholic Church being the oldest of Christian traditions (And strongly Marian at that) probably has attractive features for Wright. There is likely enough to criticise about Catholocism that he wouldn't want to be Catholic, but archaic traditions within the sect would exert an intellectual tug on someone with Wrights background. xponent Second Guessing Maru rob _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
